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Caiwei Chen
@CaiweiC
Writing about culture, internet, and China. Words et al | Party caterer | Alum
Caiwei Chen’s Tweets
It has been a ride! But it’s probably time to say that we have graduated from Chaoyang…
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Two years ago, when we started this project in February 2021, we had an expiration date in mind. After two seasons, or 31 dispatches, it's finally time to say goodbye.
chaoyang.substack.com/p/goodbye
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I don’t do this a lot but I just ran into Halbaddie on the UWS and we engaged in some Met Gala behavior together!!
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It was only a matter of time: Baidu is building its own ChatGPT and plans to integrate it into the company’s search in March, amid scrambling among US tech giants to commercialize the technology. w/
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So Zhao Lijian’s wife deleted everything from her Weibo… what happened
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I spoke to Mike Zhang, 71, who survived the mass shooting on Lunar new year in Monterey Park, CA. He said he didn’t know what gunshots sounded like before that day, but will never forget now. nytimes.com/video/us/10000 with and
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Sharing some food that I made yesterday for the Tiger to the Bunny dinner and wishing everyone a happy, joyous Chinese New Year!!🧧
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This is gonna be amazing 🤩
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new year, new creative project 
a weekly list of vitalities & delights to record 2023, in an effort to remember why being alive is really nice, after all. you can read & learn more & subscribe at jadesong.substack.com—i think it'll be fun
a weekly list of vitalities & delights to record 2023, in an effort to remember why being alive is really nice, after all. you can read & learn more & subscribe at jadesong.substack.com—i think it'll be fun
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More like Weibo… The horror of “account bombing” — seeing mutuals gone one by one, without prior notice or good reason. The great exodus to Mastodon was also common on Weibo years back.
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So Twitter is WeChat now.
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Journalists who cover Elon Musk have been suspended on Twitter tonight: O'Sullivan from CNN, Aaron Rupar and the Washington Post's .
Rupar tells me he has "no idea" why it happened.
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"We had all journeyed from a homeland that never existed—but one which, if there are enough of us, maybe will."
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ChinaTalk's hiring!
We're looking for editors w great Chinese who like to write and translate, or are interested in helping build ChinaTalk's YouTube presence (no past video editing experience required!)
editorial: forms.gle/b2KvrgqzMheqJd
video: forms.gle/wuTRDQeEboDuct
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Teacher Li played a crucial role in helping Chinese protesters, then doxxing and attacks followed.
Plot twist: the attacks did not come from the Chinese government. They are from a famous US-based Chinese Twitter influencer who is supposedly critical of China. 1/
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我们呼吁在抗议中加入第五项诉求，即关闭新疆集中营。缺少这一条诉求，我们对于解封、平等、自由、人权、民主、有尊严生活的诉求是汉族中心主义的，更是建立在对维吾尔人所受迫害的无视和麻木不仁之上。
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This is extremely outrageous. Yale Daily News staff needs to understand that not everyone is born with the privilege of freedom of speech, of being credited for their work, and newsroom rules should not facilitate "freedom of expression" of some while suppressing others.
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Hi @yaledailynews, let's talk.
Your decision to publish a report conducted by two Chinese student journalists after they requested repeatedly to remain anonymous greatly concerns Chinese journalists, including me. (Thread)
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Such important and timely work
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We’ve come up with a few suggestions for photographers videographers and editors to consider when covering protests in China farandnear.substack.com/p/minimizing-h
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These purely aesthetic Instagram pages were able to breed/foster the political, by “redistribution of the sensibles”. These affect, experienced by living bodies and enters the network circuit, accumulates and amplifies, transform what once was a tree hole to a public town square
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These archives as shown on social media timelines are autonomously grouped under coherent themes — constantly mutually inspired, responsive to the newest happenings, but also resist the coherence of a linear narrative.
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These mood-based projects, which revived aesthetics of a China that felt so lively yet distanced, garners views, likes, follows and those already with feelings of the same sort or felt something newly evoked, and formed a “zone of emotional enrichment” in users precarious reality
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…first for feelings, stories, memes, art, posters and then video footages of the protests themselves. If we look at the evolution of the pages, started as an art project showcasing photography documenting the Tiananmen movement; a mood board.
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These are not fully formed thoughts yet, but unlike traditional archives, these archives are constantly being worked on, exhibited, recontextualized, and re-searched. The straightforward and reinforced submission-to-post model acts as a bulletin board…
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In the new wave of protests and movement, emergent social media pages including and Citizen Daily on Instagram, and on Twitter has become crucial sites of organization, community formation and in Ann Cvetkovich’s words “archive of feelings”.
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Doing a talk on Wednesday about the geography of secrecy in China and how secrecy relates to 'recent' protests. No idea what I'm going to say now... But the blank piece of paper #A4纸革命 #A4Revolution is interesting in relationship to secrecy
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Thinking about this but in the context of NetEase Cloud Music comments
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Yesterday, prompted by a deadly fire in a locked-down high-rise building in Urumqi, Xinjiang, protests against Covid-19 pandemic restrictions erupted across China. To put these events into context, here is a thread of articles on different aspects of the pandemic in China. 1/
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“Down goes CCP” people chant. It has really come to this in my life time.
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Having a hard time processing everything going on in China right now, and wanting to be in those crowds more than ever.
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I have always enjoyed Weimingzi's video essays on Bilibili and appreciate this timely writeup from on this split in China's online leftist scene
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Such a fascinating piece on the funnest part of the Chinese internet, by @krishraghav of @ChaoyangTrap in today's @semafor Flagship
Subscribe to get smart guest columns like this in your inbox every weekday: semafor.com/newsletters
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Covid and its great radicalizing power
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Nameless, faceless and decentralized, many young Chinese mainlanders protest for the first time, from New York to London to Berlin to Toronto. #政治出柜
asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Chine
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Chinese internet giants turn to philanthropy under economic downturn, but it’s not just a number’s game
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Hey guys, last night in Twitter DMs I asked Sam Bankman-Fried when Alameda first borrowed FTX customer funds, what he really thinks of the SEC, and a lot more.
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Btw, the 反贼 side of Hupu, which used to live on the site's slightly more serious but now defunct 开放区 that's dedicated to discussion of politics, economics and world news. Part of the group has since migrated to Reddit at r/China_irl, aka 流浪防区.
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Hupu has been one of the most important pillar of Chinese manosphere and this episode did an excellent job touring through it ✨
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The Chad to Virgin Pipeline 
chaoyang.substack.com/p/s02-episode-
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Multiple Chinese cities including Shanghai and Shijiazhuang are ordering a halt on blanket covid testing mandate. Are we closer to normal? Slowly? Finally?
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All of us who report on China or study it, or come from China, or work with Chinese colleagues should be highly alarmed at how easy it has become to level charges of Chinese government influence and how giddily the most cynical actors in American political life exploit them.
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New Chaoyang trap episode! At this moment of stagnation and anxiety, we explored a mentality that feels particularly relevant, although it has always been around.
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Hi there. We're back from our "summer" "break."
In the closing episode of Rewilding, we look into manufactured scarcities and myths of meritocracy through the culture of "qiang" (抢): "to grab" or "to seize."
chaoyang.substack.com/p/scalper-sing
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